Going Organic

I finally finished chapter 7 of 10 chapters! What a feat! It felt so good and I hit the town with some friends and had myself a fabulous dinner. Then the next morning waking up from my Alaskan King Crab Legs and Raspberry Mojito hangover I started to edit. In the editing I noticed something. Chapter 7 just isn't working...

Realizing something I have poured your heart into isn't quite right is so hard to confess to myself. Fortunately (or unfortunately - depends on how you look at it), I've been here before. I've been at this point where I'm jubilant, proud of my progress only to be knocked down a peg or two by reality (pun intended).

Make no mistake, my dissertation will not be the next Iliad, or some other epic tome. My dissertation will be compete, it will be thoughtful and it will be mine. In order to accomplish those things a girl's got to have standards!

So, this past Sunday instead of melting down (the typical response when reality knocks me off my proverbial horse) I got back on and started to figure out what was so out of whack. To save you the boring stream of consciousness, the structure was all wrong. I wasn't taking care of answering the biggest questions using the structure I had in place. I was organizing my results all wrong.

The great news is, nothing is lost. No time is lost, no effort is lost. It is all part of this living organism. It might sound dangerously simple, but the hardest lesson to learn while writing your dissertation is that it is not static. It is not stuck in time or in an outline or even in a paradigm. The way I move from chapter to chapter seems to be redefined in more ways than I would have expected.

This is a tough realization because I am a planner. I like to know when I'm doing something, how it will get done and how long until I am finished. It's an obsession (as evidenced by the numerous time lines, schedules and dissertation calendars I've amassed in the last year).

So, today, I say with confidence that the dissertation is an organic being. It breaths, it changes forms and most importantly it has an essence (aka the thesis/research problem). When I divert from the center it shows. As it did so plainly in chapter 7. I would love to control exactly how much longer it will take to write this darned thing. But I can't. The best I can do is push through and try to enjoy the process as much as possible.

On that note - back to salvaging what I've written to fit into my new outline so I can stay on top of my new schedule - D'OH!! I'll never learn!

Happy Veteran's day!
Oh and back to my Bridget Jone Diary documentation:
Today: 0 hours on the D (Hoping to get at least 2 hours in tonight!)
Tomorrow: Hoping for 2.5 hours!